Thursday, February 21, 2013

We Discover that PressTV Lies Like the New York Times

We are used to lies from the Western media.

Remember Judy Miller at the New York Times, raising a panic about Sadam's search for "thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium."

Or Fox News and Sadam's drones of death, designed to launch "a chemical or biological attack on American cities through the use of remote-controlled "drone" planes equipped with GPS tracking maps."

When all these crooked information distributors gang up on some oil-rich country outside the orbit of the New World Order, the natural tendency is to consider whether the story emitted by the other side might not be closer to the truth than that of our own propagandists.

PressTV, a mouthpiece for the Iranian government, would seem, therefore, able to serve its masters well, providing only that it keeps to the truth or what is at least difficult to distinguish from the truth. Such a rule seems, however, to be beyond the comprehension of Press TV. The agency is capable of the lie not only direct, but easily identified as the lie direct, as we recently discovered.

In a December 19 report entitled Ottawa orders Canadian scientific journals not to publish Iranian articles, Press TV stated:

The Canadian
government has reportedly ordered the scientific journals of the country
not to publish articles authored by Iranian researchers and scientists,
Press TV has learnt.

And

In a recent move, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatric Nursing Research refused to publish an article by an Iranian assistant professor despite the earlier acceptance of the article.

The journal argued that it "will not be permitted to
publish" the article as previously stated, citing the political and
non-academic reasons.

Which seems pretty clear and prompted us to question whether John Baird, Canada's Minister of External Affairs, "is a moron" or whether Canada had been bribed, if not blackmailed or otherwise coerced, into acting as if the Minister of External Affairs is a moron.

In this, it seems, we were granting PressTV all too much credibility. Which prompts us now to express our sincere apology to John Baird for suggesting that he is a moron. On the basis of the Press TV report, the idea that John Baird is a moron seems totally unsupportable, as we were to discover when an.anonymous commenter, referring to our post about the PressTV report, asked simply:

Besides this single unattributed article, is there any actual evidence that this has happened?

A search of the Web suggested that the answer was, no. We could find no other evidence that the incident reported by Press TV happened.

Thus confronted with the fact that we might have been a little naive in accepting without question the truth of the PressTV report, we asked the Editors of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatric Nursing Research, if the PressTV report was accurate.

The answer received was prompt and definitive:

... [The Press TV report] was fictitious. [The manuscript in question] was blind peer reviewed and many amendments
suggested before publication could be considered. The author ... did not comply. [And the author was] advised the article, in its
present state, was unacceptable for publication.

So rejection of the paper referred to by the PressTV report had nothing whatever to do with the John Baird or the Government of Canada. As often happens with articles submitted for publication in a learned journal, this article failed to make the grade, although the possibility was held out to the author of publication after revision.

But ever anxious to be fair to the Iranians who seem the target of so much hate speech from the Western mainstream media, we emailed the Directors of PressTV, informing them of the information provided to us by the Editors of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatric Nursing Research and requesting:

In the interests of fairness to the Editors of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatric Nursing Research,
and of the avoidance of misunderstanding between the scientific
communities of Iran and Canada, would you please check the details of
your report and, as necessary, issue either a retraction, or evidence to
substantiate the cited claims in your report.

Two days later, having received no reply from PressTV, we emailed the Directors again asking them to:

advise whether, as requested, the matter is being inquired into.

Failing such acknowledgment, [we will] assume that you intend no action concerning this apparently false report by PressTV.

Since no response has been received to this request, we can reasonably assume that PressTV has, by default, acknowledged that its report was false and that they don't give a damn.

Which seems a pity. A scrupulously honest news channel would be a rare and wonderful thing, which would surely have great value in any international war of words.

Anyhow, it's an idea we'll leave out there. Who knows, one of the Western news sources might adopt the idea.